Wesley Snipes Plays Hard to Get via Blade 4

Apparently in Wesley Snipes’ world, the actor still has the juice to pick and choose his Hollywood movies. Um, Wesley, news flash: you don’t. Not when every film you’ve made since 2004’s “Blade: Trinity” was either shot in Romania or other parts Eastern Europe and gone directly to DVD. In any case, while doing promo rounds for “Brooklyn’s Finest”, his first Hollywood foray since “Blade: Trinity”, Snipes was asked about the possibility of returning for another “Blade” sequel. According to Snipes, he would, but “only if the script was right”.

I like Snipes, and his fall from Hollywood is the stuff of fiction novels. Was it just a case of an actor choosing the wrong projects and not realizing it, or did Hollywood just gave up on him as a box office draw? The latter seems unlikely given that the sequel did reasonably well, making $128 million from a $65 million budget, not counting DVD sales. The real culprit, I suspect, was the man himself. Chris Parry wrote a scathing article on Snipes and “Blade: Trinity” back in 2005 that’s worth a read if you want to know how Snipes became such a toxic commodity in Hollywood so fast.

In any case, Snipes is obviously playing the hard to get star here, when he shouldn’t be. Then again, when you’ve been as big as he has in the past, I suppose you have to give some lip service to playing the “Hollywood star”.

But yeah, I would definitely like to see a “Blade 4″, but probably not the same one that Snipes is thinking of. Whatever happened to that Jessica Biel/Ryan Reynolds spin-off movie everyone was talking about at the release of “Blade: Trinity”? That’s a tempting route to take with the franchise, though I suspect its time has pass now, with Reynolds already committed to fronting various big-time franchises, and Biel having, from all accounts, put her “action movie star” phase behind her. Still, what might have been…